


You're going to meet some gentle people there

by Taabe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26417107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: Good morning all! The next portkey to San Franscisco will depart from Track 1984 in 15 minutes. Make sure your belongings remain with you at all times. Unattended luggage will be fed to the Erumpent. Please keep your hands and arms inside the cardboard …
Relationships: Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Severus Potter
Kudos: 9





	You're going to meet some gentle people there

**Author's Note:**

> This story comes maybe 10 years after the play, imagining Scor Malfoy and Albus Potter on a trip to the Pacific, and I am surely far, far from the first person to think about casting spells in many languages. I don't speak Spanish, more than to pick up a few words from knowing some French and Latin and background ... I simply find it beautiful. _Alabanza_ is, as Scor Malfoy says here, the title poem of a collection by Martín Espada, and it is glorious. I hope he won't mind that I have learned that word from him. The few lines here from Federico García Lorca's nocturne (or aubade?) _La Pena Negra_ , that translation is my attempt. And I understand that _Linde_ is one of the few words in Spanish that can be either male or female.

_Good morning all! The next portkey to San Franscisco will depart from Track 1984 in 15 minutes. Make sure your belongings remain with you at all times. Unattended luggage will be fed to the Erumpent. Please keep your hands and arms inside the cardboard …_

And they were stumbling on a street corner under a rainbow of LED lights. London mid-term drizzle jolted away, and they were standing in sunlight, in a breeze cooler than they expected, between a sorbet stand and a table selling bubble tea.

Sinewy trees lined the sidewalk, raising pale branches with dense dark leaves. Shell-colored buildings folded into octagonal towers. Above their heads, a giant purple triceratops was leaning out a second-story window.

The sidewalk was solid with people.

“I thought no one was supposed to notice us come through.”

“Has anyone?” 

They looked at each other across the battered carton they were still holding. Two blokes in their 20s in jeans, jerseys, trainers and rucksacks were attracting the attention of no one at all. They set the carton down by a particolored box for the Mercury News.  
Al shoved up the tie around his pony-tail. The sun caught copper in his dark hair. 

His friend was blond, shaved up the sides and grinning slowly. “No one knows who you are,” he said, “you know that? They won’t even see you. _You’ll_ have to get a tattoo —” 

Al crooked an arm around his neck and hauled him off-balance, and they were laughing. Around them a few people smiled as they moved past, and the rest talked into invisible phones or glanced into shop windows. 

A tension was draining out of both of them. Not a soul who knows our names. Albus Severus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy don’t mean a Goddamn thing.  
They looked around at the sun and the froth of trim on light walls. A jazz trio was playing God Bless the Child on a makeshift platform and people were dancing, with their neon t-shirts and running shoes, crocs and wide neon soda straws.

“Hungry?”

“Yeah, c’mon.”

Scor stepped off the curb, and Al caught him with the arm still around his shoulders and pulled him out of the way of a unicyclist walking a chihuahua. Scor and the unicyclist high-fived, and Al felt his pulse racketing. He breathed in, thinking _not now. Don’t call attention. Not now._

*

They walked across the city. Scor was here to see everything, and Al wanted him to have everything tonight the way he wanted it. They still had tonight. Tomorrow — not yet, he told himself. Tonight’s for him. 

So they ate dumplings at a table on the sidewalk under the limber trees with lights in their leaves, and later chocolate frozen yogurt at a creamery with scrubbed steel tables and black and white photos of Guernsey cows. The woman behind the counter recommended a jazz club in the Fillmore. Scor transformed his clothing on the way, bright and loose over sandals. 

They danced. Al was always willing to watch Scor dance — even jam-packed into a transfigured warehouse with a bass thundering like a jet engine. He moved like silk.

They drank Laughing Monk Porter somewhere at a long wooden table under an exposed metal roof. Scor insisted on local microbrew and pumped everyone in range for their favorites. 

It wasn’t a maj-only bar, and Al wondered how much they were missing. He’d gotten one local lead from an office mate who’d done some advanced study at UC Berkeley, and he would have liked to check it out before the morning. But it did mean no one levitated the tables or started a game of flaming worm-hole pong.

Scor flicked bean bags at a board, and Al flashed back to the endless game of hackey sack he had played down the school hallways. His charmed ball had hit a new note every time it made contact, and he could play it over his body like a talking drum. 

They left the bar and walked. And they talked as they hadn’t since they’d shared bunks in a dorm and staying up late meant sitting together on the window ledge, dangling their feet over six stories of air and watching the owls gliding in and out of the windows.

They still saw each other most weekends, and even on flying weeknights — 80 kilometers apart meant nothing to a wizard — but dipping in and out of someone’s life wasn’t the same. 

They were angling gradually northwest, comparing ironwork on painted lady Victorians, and Scor was talking about the teen spoken word group he volunteered with as a mentor.

He broke off. His head went up.

They both felt it. And then they were running.

It was the cold that raised the hairs on your neck when you walked into a silent room. It was the scrape when someone flicked a wand like a switchblade. Someone was sick with fear.

They heard voices over the hard slap of their feet. They rounded the corner into an intersection like hundreds of intersections — an empty lot, a metal fence, a plastic sign over a closed door. People were moving steadily toward the fence. They were shadows in sneakers and jeans. They looked no older than the students in the resistence, Al thought, the ones who had died when his father was 17.

They were surrounding one figure backed against the chain link. And they were crowding in. Bodies jostled and advanced. They were shouting and the words surged together, too loud to make sense of them. 

Al heard fists connect.

The mob had not heard anyone behind them. Scor had his wand out, and he was shouting now, bearing down on them to shake them loose. His hand filled with light. The lot filled with it, and the figure against the fence looked up. Albus saw dark hair cut like Scor’s, curling thickly on top and shaved at the sides, and dark eyes, set shoulders and braced body — as young as the others. 

The first of the attackers swerved at the light, and Albus saw the press where the crowd drove forward. Where the shouting was loudest. Something moved.  
Something was there. Pulling like a magnet.

It was human and not human, a grey half-solid shape, and it was still intent on the ones who had not turned, focusing attention on the hands holding the teenager against the metal. Scor was among the attackers, and Al, sprinting in his wake, did the only thing he could think of. He ran straight into the melee around the writhing teenager, jarring the closest one who held him, and lodged his body between them. 

He felt the kid behind him wrench against someone else’s hold. Blows landed on Al’s shoulder and chest. A normal seethe of teenagers would have reacted by now to two fit adults who could call in backup. He would have expected them to break it up, to run, at least to yell and question. Their single focus chilled him. 

Any overt magic against them would be illegal — any magic they could recognize would be illegal and dangerous. And he would not use magic or physical force against kids half his age. 

And none of that mattered, he thought. Fists to his jaw were no more than he deserved. 

Scor was arguing, drawing attention, feeling for leaders in the group. He must be sheilding himself, expecting Al would do the same. Al felt the teenager kick at a captor and pull free, and the lean body, not yet grown, coiled to attack and flung an arm up to catch a blow. 

Damn it, he thought, don’t break away — they’ll surround us. Hold on, for God’s sake. He planted his feet, damn asphalt, couldn’t even be on sand, and hauled at memories of his only tutorial with Flitwick. Root yourself, he said. He remembered the feeling in the soles of his feet that day, the stone room and the professor’s calm tenor voice, but all he had tonight was pavement and the light in Scor’s hand and the tattoo on his chest showing an amber gleam under the wide neck of his shirt, and his voice calm in the shouting, and the way he stood with the weight on the balls of his feet. Al opened his bare, empty hands and silently wrenched at gods he didn’t believe in and silently cast — _refugio._

He felt the earth under his feet. Blows fell, but he did not feel them. He was real, he was alive, and they were bound together, he and the kid and the rock they stood on. He moved forward to give the kid room to breathe, but he faced outward. More of the attackers were falling back, moving around Scor, but the human-inhuman was still facing the two of them. It moved forward to face him.

He felt cold. Chilled with sweat. Its eyes were blank, and he could only call it an it — it held no feeling of male or female or any kind of human recognition. It bore into him with fury and damage and annihilation. 

He said out loud, “I’ve met sods like you before.” 

His voice came out hoarse, and he felt himself shaking. But he did not move. He had faced some kinds of blankness all his life, and a sardonic flicker in his stiff, cold thoughts said well fuck it. The kid moved beside him, and he felt a slight shoulder against his, and another voice as rough and tenor as Flitwick’s said “I have too.”

And then Scor was turning to him, to them, with the group around him, turning like the hub of a wheel, and he turned the light they probably saw as a flashlight and pointed it, and called, and some of them raised their voices with him — _Alabanza!_

The dusty tarmac and the stained metal fence seemed to glow with something warmer and more real than wand-light. Al felt again in full the charge of the city streets he and Scor had walked through together that night. He felt a lift like the moment you ran onto the train platform and saw a friend after a long absence, like the first day of vacation. It was the taste of pickled ginger and the way conversation circled between you on an updraft, unselfconscious and electric, and turned every street sign into an inside joke.

Silently he returned the spell. He felt the tension shifting around them. He felt the group resolving into individual people. The inhuman-human was losing its hold.

A phone rang. The ringtone started playing Nicki Minaj, Star ships were meant to fly.

Al heard someone fumble for it and pull it free. The song grew louder.

Scor took a step toward the fence.

The strangle-hold broke. The grey miasma was sliding on the air like oil on a wet pavement. He felt it dissolving. The air touched his skin with an acrid, greasy film. People were moving. The phone was still singing. Scor touched his arm.

Al turned, finally, to the kid at his shoulder, who was standing, still braced, with an expression he knew too well. Getting attacked by these punks hadn’t been a surprise. It had happened before. He could feel the shoulder that touched his, wary, muscled and vulnerable. This kid still hadn’t hit a growth spurt. Red marks on arms and jaw would darken into bruises. A kid in jeans and a t-shirt that said Looking for a mind at work over Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler and Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr — a kid with shoulders hard, hands clenched, still tense enough to run. 

Al wanted to reach out, to soothe that fear somehow, but it would be an intrusion from a stranger. A familiar anger fought in him with the lingering joy of the spell, and he only said “are you ok?”

The kid was looking at Scor, with his ink and his hair, his copper earring and bright trousers. 

Scor said with sad warmth, as though they’d known each other for years, “Have you got someone you can call?”

In the silence, he added, “I’m Scor. Don’t ask. He’s Al. We both use he and his.”

The kid took a slow step to look at him and let out a breath.

He said. “So do I.” 

By his voice, he spoke Spanish as fluently as English. Al met Scor’s eyes. _And what do we do to help a Latino trans man with more courage than I have, after midnight on a Saturday when we’re 5,000 miles from home? And he’s probably still in high school._

He was looking at Scor’s left hand, where the light no longer shown. Scor no longer held his wand. 

The kid said, “What you did. To get them to leave. Can you teach me that?” 

Scor’s expression tightened, and Al could read it clearly. _I can’t teach magic — not here — not without putting you at risk. And you need this._

Al lifted an eyebrow. He didn’t need to say it. _He heard you casting. But maybe he thinks you’re a weird British git who likes shouting in Spanish for crowd control. I don’t know if he saw that thing. If he sees us do anything now that looks like weird shit to him, and he’s not a maj — or he’s a maj and doesn’t know it — we’re all bolloxed._

Scor said, “Can we help you get somewhere — do you have somewhere safe?”

A closed look and shaken head answered him, and Scor turned as bleak as Al knew he must look. 

Salt air banked down the sidewalk. It tasted raw off the ocean. 

Al felt Scor’s eyes on him, and he rubbed his empty hand on his jeans hard enough to friction-burn. He knew what Scor wanted from him, and it made sense — he had done more silent casting than Scor had, and Scor didn’t know — damn it to the frozen seventh circle of hell.

Scor said, “What’s your name?” He made it sound casual, like he was willing to step off any time. Like they didn’t need to know it for any way they could help.

The kid lifted a shoulder. Half turned away. He is voice was too carefully casual. 

“Linde.” 

Scor said as though he was holding onto calm with his bare hands, “We’ll help you. If you want us to.”

Linde backed a step, and his hands were not steady. He looked too thin, half-grown. His eyes were too old for his body. His hair fell into them, and he scrubbed it away. Something welled in that gesture, something young and angry, something vulnerable and durable. 

Al thought, He’s not letting us take him home. Maybe he doesn’t have one. Maybe he’s afraid of us. Maybe he’s afraid we’ll try to make him go back. Goddamn it I’ll have to try.  
Root yourself.

All he had was tarmac and the willed stillness in Scor’s body and a boy who held himself around ingrained pain. A dark smudge spread at Linde’s temple. He was bleeding.

He said “It’s ok. I’m ok. Thanks.”

He sounded as blunt as Scor’s young poets. Muscle pulled taut against the stretched neck of his t-shirt, and he would face the bastards tomorrow and go on with nothing more than guts, and an eye for the glint off a sliver of glass or the spoke of a bridge or the rasp of a gull to distract him like ice on a burn. 

Al felt himself saying silently you won’t have to face them alone, and he was reaching out as he would have to Scor at that age, not with his hands but with with his body and bones and blood. Sweat ran on his back, and he felt the alignment, the words cutting clean through. He had worked them out years ago, and maybe it was a homemade mashup, a kind of shorthand wound into an old homework assignment, but it was what he could do. It always had been. He said the spell silently into the sea air.

“ _Soledad_.”

He repeated the lines of the poem that had given it to him, bck in those long nights in the vac when he knew Scor was alone and awake in his room in that endless stone house with no one to hear him.

_Soledad, por quién preguntas_  
_sin compaña y a estas horas?_  
_Pregunte por quien pregunte …_

_Soledad, who are you calling for_  
_alone in the small hours?_  
_I am calling for one I call ..._

It moved in his mouth and in his hands. His breathing was rough. He felt something catch, he believed he did, and Linde’s shoulders jolted like an electric shock.  
Linde looked each of them in the face and backed another step. Al slid an arm around Scor’s shoulders, for Scor’s comfort or his own or Linde’s, he couldn’t have said.  
Linde backed another step, and he was at the corner of the fence. He swung around it and ran.

Scor pulled out of Al’s hold.

“We can’t just let him go.”

“We have a line. I think. Can you feel it?”

A pause. Scor put air between them.

He said, “You think.” 

He stood on the curb. His voice was hard and his torn shirt blew open. 

Al fumbled for conviction. “I’ve only ever done it with — if he’s not a maj —” 

Then they were a danger to him. More dangerous the longer they stayed. And they were bound. Al could feel a tug on the line. He believed he could. The spell was home-made and worn and old, but as long as it held, if Linde called, they could reach him.

He remembered then what linde meant in Spanish. It was a rare male-and-female word, and it meant a boundary. Liminal space.  
Scor looked down the street in the dark.

Al said, “There must be people here who can help him.”

Scor lifted a shoulder, not looking at him, and Al knew he was thinking of his Spoken Word people and the network they provided. They might have contacts here. This city must have its own protections.

“It’s 8 hours later in London,” he said. “You can call now.” 

Scor touched the copper glint of his hidden wand, and they turned toward the sea and the Presidio.

—

The next morning Scor saw the bruises on Al’s back and arms and shoulder.

He looked in concern and then in calculation.

“You let them hit you.”

Al looked into his face, and his mouth went dry. Scor would work it out. Even in the early morning dark after a mob. He would realize in time what Al had done. And what he had not done.

Scor said, “we should find him.”

And of course he would, Al told himself. Even if it had been Scor’s own spell he would take off at dawn without breakfast to make sure the kid was all right. It had nothing to do with his confidence in the spell working. Al told himself that.

“One thing first,” he said, holding his voice calm. “It’ll help, I swear.”

He could see confusion in Scor’s look and turned away before it could harden into doubt. He opened the window wide and let the sea air run over his skin. It smelled of fog and cedar, and he looked out across the bay, into 19,000 kilometers of Pacific. 

He could feel Scor’s eyes on his back and did not need to hear him say we need to be ready.

“I know,” he said to the beads of water on the cedar tree. “That’s why.”

*

Albus hauled them both to Embarcadero and past the the open-air market. He pulled away from the stalls and turned up a steep sidewalk past the trolley tracks. When they came up level with the metro stop, Scor held his ground. Al pushed by him, and Scor caught his arm and said “You’re not usually this kind of a bastard.”  
Albus knew his oldest friend was entirely capable of walking off and leaving him here to get over himself. He could feel the invisible line he had made the night before, and a biting chill ran along it like a breeze down his neck. It was not a crisis — it was hunger you could be distracted from, but only for so long. 

It was more than enough to pull Scor to the source. He might only still be standing here because Al had set the spell, and they could follow it more strongly together.  
They stood facing off in the crosswalk, and the wind shook up the rise. 

He couldn’t make himself say it. Not even now, to keep Scor with him, knowing he had to do this now, knowing without Scor he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. 

An oncoming car shoved them to one side onto the narrow lip of sidewalk. 

All he could say was “come on.” 

Scor must have heard the edge of the chasm in it. He stepped up the curb and shoved his way past and took the lead up the hill. 

He let Al choose the metro and the street and the shop, and he stood outside it, arms folded, waiting. 

They stood in a tree-lined arcade. The shops were merging into student housing, and a few blocks farther out sun-bleached ranch houses stretched away to the ridge. They could hear gulls through the sounds of traffic. Scor stepped close to the window, shading his eyes at reflections of Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin from a record shop across the way.  
The doorway lay under a stone arch. The door was propped open with a chunk of sand-colored stone, but they were standing in the sun and looking into shadow.  
Albus tugged down on the straps of his rucksack. He pulled it around until he could reach the zipper.

Scor was staring him down, the way he used to look at anyone who talked about his mother, the look that said you’re going there, then fucking go there and deal with it, or get off my ground. His shoulders were set.

Albus yanked his hair tie up and the zipper of the rucksack down, holding it against his chest, and walked through the open door. He felt a stirring of air as he crossed the threshold, and a warm touch on the back of his neck. 

The room felt larger and lighter on the inside. He had not expected it to look like this. Along the walls, beeswax dragons curled with wicks in their mouths. He stared between hand-dyed cloth, net floats and copper-washed door latches. 

He saw no sign of what he was looking for.

At the center, around a circle of counter, fine work floated on levels of warm wood — hand-woven baskets, cast silver, sculpted driftwood and glass blown as membrane-thin as jellyfish.

Two people looked up from the counter. They were leaning together and looking at something between them, and Al felt Scor stir at his shoulder. The light came from a constellation of bulbs above them, and he realized they were not strung from the ceiling. If a nomaj walked in he guessed they would look retro-minimalist, like one of those invisible IKEA bookshelves, but he knew. They hung in the air, and the light just above the counter wasn’t resting on the glass top. It was the same kind of globe, drifting on its own.

That was one sign at least.

The owners, if they were, looked up at him. The woman swung around with a lithe shift of shoulders under her tank top. She had short-cut dark hair. The man behind the counter seemed to be weighing them up. He had an air of assurance, and he beckoned them in, in command and courteous.  
If he had seen them taking in the ceiling lights, it didn’t worry him.

Albus felt himself shaking. He felt Scor at his back, waiting for him to move. His shirt was sticking to him, and he was acutely aware of the coffee stains, the worn treads on his shoes, the signs of living out of a duffle that his best efforts with the hostel’s shower hadn’t done away.  
He stepped forward, inching past the wooden platforms, conscious of his fumbling steps and every glass frond and antenna his shirt could brush.

He held out his hand. They were introducing themselves, Tarik and Padma, and he felt the strength of Tarik’s grip and the calluses on his fingers. Tarik stood a head taller than any of them, and Padma moved casually into his space to give Albus room.  
Albus reached into his bag, fumbling. His hands were sweating. He said into the quiet, “I wanted to ask. About.” and the word bit off short. 

He held out his wand.

He felt Scor beside him, moving forward.

The wooden haft slid on his palm.

Padma took it, and Al let her. She felt it and handed it across the counter. 

Tarik turned it over in the light. 

“A repair?”

Albus pressed down on the counter with his empty hands, holding himself up. These warm people knew nothing about him. If he went on with this, they would have to ask, and he would have to tell them. Or walk out and nothing would change — and if Linde called, he would have no defense but his bare hands.  
He was breathing hard, and his hands locked on the bar.

“No.” 

The man holding his wand made a soft sound of understanding and met his eyes.

“Come on back,” he said.

*

Albus felt Scor move aside, staring into a flaming obolisk of glass to give him privacy, and reached out to catch some part of him, a strap, a sleeve. Scor let him and came up with him, bumping against his shoulder. 

They were threading their way back between drift wood and sea glass to a curtain of glass beads clattering like rain sticks.  
Behind it, they walked into into a wide room with brick walls and a moppable floor. This was a working space. 

One splattered and scrubbed work bench held ceramics tools. Another stocked a blow torch and a thicket of wires with wooden handles, and mason jars sorting glass rods into colors like sticks of hard candy at a general store. 

Light spilled through double doors that opened onto a sandy yard. The sun touched a stone sink in one corner and slid over a thick wooden table edged with clamps and nicked and lumpy from hand saws, dried varnish and wood glue. Farther in, in shadow, Albus thought he could see the solid disk of an electric lathe.

Tarik stopped at the woodworker’s bench, feeling the length of the wand.

“All right,” he said, considering it with his fingers. “It’s not broken.”

“No,” Albus said again. He tried to clear his throat.

“But it’s not working right. Not for you.” His wrist flexed, and muscle moved in his forearm.

“Not. Not. Since.” Albus stopped. Since — how long? The feeling of muddle had grown familiar over time, but when had he skidded into the wall? You could get by day to day with no more magic than it took to boil a kettle. He was a student, an academic, past the practical tests. In law, you didn’t need to do magic, you only needed to know it.

That was why no one else knew.

He had struggled in his spell classes, and more as they got more advanced. But now his mind felt blank. It was worse than the sputtering starts, the foundering spells — the void that existed suddenly and finally where he had taken strength for granted. In classes at least he had had assignments. He had had the words to say, even if they no longer seemed to mean anything.

“I’m guessing,” Tarik said, his voice clinical and quiet, “you’ve been feeling this come on for awhile. Maybe since you hit your growth. I’m guessing you outgrew it. That happens, you know.”

Albus felt involuntary muscles locking in his eye sockets and the base of his skull. The tension ached.

“I didn’t. I — thought it was — it wasn’t —”

“Natural.” Padma set a burl down front of him. She was pulling out baskets of odd ends of wood, corners left from earlier projects. Scor aligned them on the bench, fingering the scraps.

“Yes, it happens.” Tarik set the wand on the table. “People outgrow a lot of things. Something worked for you as a child well enough. You get older, you get stronger, you know more. You need more. More than your mind and body knew about back then.”

“They said the wand. Chooses you.” He couldn’t get enough breath. How had he changed — how had he gotten it wrong from the beginning, finding a tool that would blow like a fuse? No one else in his family had dealt with this, not in all his mother’s clan all the way back to Cuchulain and the Red Abbot of Glendochart. How could it be like this and no one knew, no one said? 

“They who?” Tarik looked at him straightly. 

“The Ollivanders. Everyone goes there — ” He stopped, and his hand closed around the burl. He heard the word echo in this room. Everyone? He listened to Tarik’s gravity, Padma’s expressive hands, and the scent of cedar and piñon that never grew where he was born. I come from a small island. Maybe we’re rubbish at this. His knuckles whitened. 

Tarik lifted his hand, and he was holding a tapered dowel as long as his forearm and as broad at the base as his thumb. Albus hadn’t seen where he reached for it, but that didn’t surprise him. You carried your wand handy, where you could palm it faster than you’d jerk back from a flame, and you kept it in a form no one would look at twice. 

But the wand itself surprised him. The grain of the wood terraced from dun to red-gold to dark-roast, like flying over canyon country, and it was smooth and hard as a fire-tempered point until the hand-grip. That looked textured, as though the maker had slid off the bark and then followed the natural contours of the limb, polishing it without sanding it down. 

Tarik held it like a chef rocking a knife, like an actor holding the stage while the light comes up. His shoulders squared under the jacket. The muscle firmed in his arm, and his attention focused until the room, the smell of sawdust and salt water, the changing light, all seemed to turn on his next move. Albus felt the three of them taut with expectation. His throat and gut hurt with it.This man could corral a wildfire.

Whatever Albus’ wand had been to him, it had never been this. Never this balance, this utter confidence.

Tarik moved his free hand, his left hand, in the traditional wand gesture for a simple summoning. He caught the scrap of sawn-off pine that flicked toward him out of a basket and dropped it into Albus’ hands.

“It’s a tool,” he said. “A conduit. Nothing in here that isn’t in you.”

Albus backed away, physically recoiling, blundering into Scor. The shard of wood dropped to the floor. Not the wand, it was him, it was in him. _Nothing in you._ As though he hadn’t heard it before, seen it before. _Not like your dad, then. That’s not how we do things. What’s he like at home? Pay attention Potter. This is the 21st century. They say it’s in the blood. Your brother could before he could walk. Just give him time. Didn’t he teach you anything? If you can’t remember I’m not telling you. He’ll grow into it. Make him — hold him down. Snakes don’t have balls. Your name’s not Weasley. Sod off._

Damned for being his father’s son and damned for not being, that was life, that was so old he’d have said it was almost worn out, but now was he going to prove them all finally right — cock-blocked like a fucking squib, his fizzling teenage gropings the best it ever got — he felt himself heaving. His hands were locked on Scor’s upper arms, his face pressed into Scor’s neck. He felt palms on his back, moving firmly. Scor was taking his weight. Scor knew too much about misery to be ashamed by it. 

“Al,” Padma’s voice came distinctly at his shoulder. “Wait. Listen.”

His throat locked with nausea.

“A misfit,” Tarik said, “that’s something else.” 

He always had been. A misfit. But never this. He had never been useless. He had never been unfit to exist. If that was all. All there ever was. If that was what was in him. How could he go on eating, sleeping, fueling himself — what was there to sustain? God, what people would think if they knew.

His head lifted and dug into Scor’s shoulder again in a tension harder than weeping. Scor was holding him. He was listening to this, and he cupped Albus’ head to his shoulder, closing around him, and his voice came out husky, the way it got when something bore down hard enough — Albus had heard it no more than three times in almost twenty years — 

“Leave him the fuck. Alone.” 

“I don’t think you understand.” Tarik spoke to Albus’ back, calm and inexorable. “A mis-fit between you and the wand. When it’s the wrong tool, sometimes it throws you. You’re fighting yourself.”

Scor was moving his fingers, and Albus felt the pattern on his back. It was a wand movement for healing, a charm for soreness or fever or disquiet. A soothing like damp air before rain. He felt their hearts beating. The blood rammed in his throat.

“We may have something for you,” Tarik said. “I can’t guarantee.”

“It’ll tell you something,” Padma said, “no matter what happens. And that will be more than you know now.”

They waited, not impartial but not trying to sell him on anything. He straightened, still standing close enought to Scor to feel bone under his shirt. Albus’ head had been resting on ink — the bird on Scor’s chest and over his collar bone, the tattoo in strong lines of black, white and amber. As Scor breathed it seemed to be breathing.  
Albus remembered Scor having it done. Beads of blood on his skin.

“You’re saying I have to do it all again,” he said.

He thought of that trip to the wand shop. He had been five. Younger than most people — his grammar school classmates had still been sneaking their parents’ wands and getting grounded for it (literally, no flying) until boarding school. But James had had one for a year by then, and his parents had already been worrying, wanting, telling Albus what not to do, not to be … 

He could feel his parents standing behind him at the shop counter, waiting for each box to open. Waiting for the woman at the counter above his head to hand him down another one. James had told him you had to go on looking at wand after wand until you got the right one, and he had seen himself reaching for box after box and nothing happening, no spark catching, no sign of life.

They had said nothing. They had tensed like a wire with every box top he lifted. He had wished they would talk, not just breathe sharply or hold their breath. He had quivered to every shift in their thoughts. No evergreen, because Tom Riddle’s wand had been yew. No Hawthorne; hawthorne could be unstable.  
When the first dragon wand came out he set his teeth and refused to touch it. They got tense and crowdingly sharp, and rustily polite to the woman in the shop, and his throat went dry, and he couldn’t say _it’s heartstring — no one’s killing a dragon for me._

Phoenix numbed him. Unicorn felt sleek and far away. And the wand he finally felt warm in his hand gave no one any joy. Apple wood. Mistletoe. An old recipe, not often used.  
Here he was, 20 years and nine time zones away, and they thought anything could change? 

He finally thought to ask, “How do wizards here get theirs?”

Tarik rolled his wand between his hands. “Some of my students make their own. Part of their dissertation. I did.” 

“I had mine made for me.” Padma spun hers between her fingers, balancing and playing with it. “It’s deodar.” The wood rippled in golden threads of growth rings pooling around dark eyes, and as it warmed in her hand it smelled of cedar.

“Mine is Iron tree,” Tarik said. “Wild Olive. The core is hair from the beard of a Walia ibex. Freely given.” His voice roughened, and he looked suddenly bleak.  
Padma held out her wand between them, opening her hand, inviting any of them to take it. Scor turned the wand on her palm. Up the length of it a skilled hand had carved a microscopic pattern of curling leaves.

He traced fronds with his fingertips, and she asked, bringing him into the circle, “How about you?”

Scor flushed to his hairline and looked evenly back. “Mine was my mother’s.” 

Al felt Tarik and Padma going still as they took that in — that Scor used a wand a woman had carried, and he loved it. He spoke with quiet pride, and something braced in his body against past experience. And his mother was dead. 

Scor tugged at his earring, a plain coppery loop today. He changed it off and on. Sometimes he wore the wand as a pendant or a torque, and once for several weeks in summer he had worn it as a coiled Norse armband, a gleam on his bare skin. It came away in his hand and straightened into a simple length of wood, slightly tapered and barely shaped except for the patina and indenting from generations of hands. The wood was dark, a deep cacao color with copper highlights, indestructible.  
“Red oak,” he said, “and petrified antler of Irish elk. It was her great grandmother’s.” 

In his hand it looked like a live thing, as alive as the bird on his breast. Albus thought again of the day he had had the ink done. Blood on his skin. A tension and anguish he could only bear by scarring it into his body and sweating it out in physical pain.

No one else but his father had ever fully recognized the pain, anymore than they recognized the bird. Dark beak and dark brown eye, bands of charcoal and white on its head and the ruffled feathers on its back, black and amber on its breast. No one else would blazon himself with a tattoo — as broad as his spread hands and abstract as a thunderbird — of a quail. 

It was the bird of Asteria, the titan, the mother of Hecate and of witch-craft. His mother’s name.

Maybe, Albus thought, I have a dim idea now how it felt.

“How did you know it was yours,” he asked. He had never asked before. He had been afraid to tread too close to that pain. Afraid for him, he thought for the first time, or for me? 

“After she died, I picked it up because it was hers.” Scor cupped it in his palms. “Just to hold it. Something she carried every day. She used to wear it as a glass bead on a thong, or sometimes a cockle shell, but I knew what it was. Dad left it in her jewelry box, and one day when he was out I went through and found it. I started wearing it. You saw it.”  
And kids had given him crap for it, and he would look through them as though they weren’t there. It must have seemed beyond irrelevant against the touch of some small part of his mother’s life. 

“You used to hate it,” Scor said, and Albus remembered giving some git in second year blinking day-glo fangs that sang Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl for the rest of the day, because the guy wouldn’t shut up. He himself had tried to ask Scor why he kept wearing the thing when it shone like a marble, why not at least make it less obvious, why give them a target. Because he’d hated the way Scor froze everything out when someone started in on him, just shut the door and went somewhere behind his eyes and let no one in, not even him. But God, he’d never asked what it was.

“I keep finding new kinds of bastard to be, don’t I,” he said, and took Scor by the shoulders again, intentionally this time. 

“Dad knew,” Score said, directly to him, “but he didn’t stop me. We never talked about it, but he let me keep it on me. And then I was holding the bead one day, and I felt it like a current. Like warm water. And I realized I’d been holding the necklace like that in class half the time, or thinking about it to focus, that I’d been using the wand, not even knowing it. Once I knew, it felt right — it was just the way it was — and I couldn’t use the old one. I just stopped. I think some of the teachers knew, but no one ever said, they just let me get on with it.”

“It happens a lot more than anyone talks about,” Tarik said, looking over Scor’s shoulder at the dark red gleam in his hand. “A wand is a conduit, tuned to you. How can anyone know at 11 all they’ll be at 21?”

“Or at 41. You kids have a lot to look forward to.” Padma caught Scor’s eye, and they smiled at each other, a wry, sad look with accord in it. “Finding new power is worth it,” she said. “Naming it’s worth it. Isn’t it.” 

“Yeah,” he said to her over Albus’ arm, as though he knew exactly what she meant. The wand changed in his hand to a disk of amber fire as wide as his palm, a glass bead on the old leather thong but grown wide, and he hung it around his neck, resting on his collar bone.

Albus dropped his empty hands.

Padma put a basket of wood ends into them.

He picked one up. Put it down. He picked up another, looking at the dark eye in it and feeling its unexpected lightness. Spalted maple. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the grain and the shift in textures.

He said “We may have met a maj last night. But we’re not sure he knows it.”

Scor took up the story as Al moved his hands over smoothed burls. Tarik and Padma might be able to help. And before they went any farther, they should know.  
Any show of magic to anyone without it was illegal. By casting aloud last night, Scor had put anyone associated with him at risk. Trying to teach Linde could get them both arrested, if he tried. Not teaching him could get him killed. 

Al touched another smooth twig. Turned one in his fingers. Red-gold cherry wood. The golden ripple of curly birch. 

He remembered professor Flitwick again. Root yourself. Your energy can move through stone, through living plants, through fire. It can move through anything around you that holds energy. And their energy can move through you.

The spell he had cast last night was the first he had felt move through him in years. Maybe he needed to release the dam in himself.  
Knowing you wanted something didn’t make it happen. But he could keep trying.

He had lost count of the baskets and the shapes and the textures when the vibration met his fingers. He let them rest, and the feeling seemed to stir in his palm like warm water. Like the touch of a hand. He lifted out a shaving, golden brown with a darker flowing grain. 

“It hums,” he heard himself say aloud.

“It’s a tone wood,” Padma said. “Umbellularia californica. California Laurel.”

—

They were standing on a hillside on coarse grass. It fell steeply down to the tree line, and below that to the shore, and from this height they could look out over the lower slope of douglas firs and cedar to the sea. They were standing on a pathway across the face of the hill in a fine drizzle.  
Wind shook through the leaves above them with a sound like rain. 

They all looked up. 

Trailing limbs blew out, and the long, tapered leaves shone with the damp. The tree was flowering in creamy clusters in the new growth, and in the moist air broken leaves smelled of spice.

Albus put a hand on its wet bark. The bowl looked more than three feet thick. He felt the crevices in the surface, the torque of the trunk. He felt the sheer weight of it.  
It stood over him, a vast wet living thing, and he felt oddly amazed to be within touch of it, like swimming with a humpback whale.

“They’ve been around for 53 million years,” Padma said, and he said dazedly “trees or whales?”

She smiled and said “yes.” 

He was feeling with both hands now. The humming vibration burred in his palms and up his arms.

She said “I heard a whale sing once. I was in the water, diving off Vava’u, and the sound vibrates through your whole body.”

She quivered, head to foot, and the movement seemed to envelop her in invisible salt water. 

And he felt a low, bass thrumming in the soles of his feet, in his calves, between his ribs, catching his breath. He pressed against the tree unselfconsciously, wet bark against his bare ribs. He felt around with both hands. It was too wide for him to encircle, but he held on. He felt movement in his fingertips, as though he could sense pores opening and fluid rising in capillary action. He was breathing with it. 

He clung to the forked stems that made up its central core. His body shook like the sounding board of a guitar. As though the trailing limbs were playing him. As though he were singing at the top of his voice.

The rain slicked his hair. He shook water out of his eyes. He felt alive. He thought he must have felt like this in some half-imagined time in his childhood. He must sometime have known this antic rush of utter possibility, for him to recognize it now, but he could not remember when.

He remembered intensity. He felt the raw air moving through the window in the hols after Scor’s mother died. Albus’ parents would not let him call, even at Christmas, and so he sat by the window in the small hours, working at the sending spell, pounding at it and chiselling and molding it again, until he heard Scor’s indrawn breath and felt him near as clearly as in their dorm room, and he could say something, finally, and Scor wouldn’t have to face the eternal early morning hours alone.

He’d said _hey_. And then _I couldn’t call before._ And then _I can just stay. If you want._

And he had reached out as he would have at school when he found Scor face down on the bed, but this time without thinking and without hesitation.  
He felt Scor’s cold hand grab onto his, impossibly, invisibly, across a hundred miles, but real all the same. 

And then he felt snow falling on his bare arm.

He had put a hand through the window. The glass and his arm were still whole.

And he didn’t know what he’d done, but it didn’t matter if he could sit here and talk and hold on. He talked about the Unsilent Night flashmob that had lit up half the downtown the night before last and the gingerbread griffins nesting on the mantle downstairs, and he held hard onto that gripping hand.  
He felt wet bark against his forearms. He had forgotten he could do a thing like that. He had forgotten the naked necessity of it. 

Had he ever felt that confidence as an adult?

One weekend he’d gone to see Scor at Cambridge, in their second Michaelmas term, after a summer apart. He had bounced up from LSE on a portkey that looked like a bakelite telephone, and they had laughed themselves sick over it until the station master thought they were drunk, and they’d walked around town untrammeled, on their own. He had been doing pro bono work through his internship, and it had just begun to feel real. As though he could stand up for something. 

He’d been longing to talk about the mother and child he was advising — he could not say much because of confidentiality, and he had been seeing their faces and hearing their voices all week since she had come in to see him in wine dark dungarees, her hair beautifully braided in a pattern she told him had existed for 5,000 years, and she was holding her son on her hip. Her wizarding husband wanted custody of him, because she had no magic that British law wanted to recognize. He listened to her talking in even, measured tones, about a hostility that threatened their lives. He listened to her protecting the boy in her arm, and he knew he did not know what that self-control cost her. The iron in her eyes and in her jawline, he thought, should give the commissioner a new way to define force.

And Scor had talked about the teens he was mentoring in his spoken word group. And they were talking in grand theory, but they were doing something — walking together up the main street, taking photos of pub signs, solemn and hilarious and absolutely sure, for once, that they were where they wanted to be.  
How long had it been since he’d last felt like that? He felt his forehead dig against the bark, and his face was wet, and his hands were raw. How goddamn long?  
He kicked off his shoes and climbed in among the twined trunks, twining himself around them. His mind was singing, and he clung for fear of letting go, not of falling but of losing this clarity again. He was wrapping his body around a wand large enough to hold him.

He felt his shirt and jeans clinging to him. He felt the rain on his skin, the blood moving under his skin and the sap moving under the bark. He had never felt a tree as a living organism before. He had never felt the motion of leaves breathing in. He had never felt water coursing up from the roots. His face was wet with tears, and his grazed hands were wet with blood. 

He felt a cold hand clamp down on his. 

Scor had hold of him, impossibly, 30 feet in the air. His chest and trousers and shins were muddy with the climb.

“Al.” Padma was standing below him. “You can let go. You can let go and take it with you.” 

“Take it?” he said, breathless and appalled as though she had told him to break an old woman’s hand. “It’s alive.”

It must have lived here more than 200 years.

“That’s why you ask,” Tarik said, standing on the open hillside with beads of water in his hair. 

“You could ask a woman for a strand of hair,” Padma said, “or a man. It doesn’t need to hurt.” 

“You can ask him and her,” Tarik said. “Laurel trees are both.” He reached up toward a cluster of the lemon-pale flowers and long tapered leaves.

Albus wanted to say _in what language?_ — in what language could he ask and be sure the tree understood him, and he understood the answer?

But in what language had they been communing since Albus appeared here on its, her, his hill? He had not asked to climb into its, her, his heart, in any way he knew. In its, her, his language, would a Laurel tree have a name?

We believe we channel ourselves in wood, and yet we think the wood has no sentience. I should not be thinking only of what I can do. I should not be thinking only that it will do me good. I should not be that kind of bastard. 

He rested one hand and his forehead against the trunk.

_You move me,_ he said to the heartwood and the pistils and stamens in the opening buds. _You have a power to move me more than I understand. I think I need to ask if you will help me. If I can help you. If I can, I will._

He blinked water out of his eyes until he could see. Scor locked his grip and rode a branch facing him, waiting for him to lift his head.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said, and Albus said “I’ve never been scared like this. Everything before was pressure from the outside. This was losing myself.”

He tightened their grip.

“The only thing harder would be losing you.” 

*

Padma called to them among blowing branches. 

She lept, beckoning into the rain.

She seemed to be bending with the tree, leaping as the wind surged in the branches. 

Scor swung from the branch and dropped down to meet her. He held his own wand glistening with rain, and he was holding her eyes, answering her movement, and his arms and shoulders and hips swung. They were limb-lithe. Their wands rapped and rang, and they echoed the beat on their bodies.

Tarik was keeping a counter-rhythm with the wind. His wand rippled like a flamenco strum as the living branches struck it. 

Al felt the beat in his chest. A double pulse rocked like a heartbeat. It pulled at him to move. He felt the tree trunk holding him up, and he slid in toward it, lowering himself into the heart of the spreading trunks.

He pulled himself to stand on lower branches. He felt for the roots with his feet.

He walked out to meet the dancers, drawing his hand along a limb as though stroking down an arm to the fingertips. He felt the taproots spreading under his feet, under the soil.  
Branches blew against his hair, and the rain brushed his face. He pulled the tie from his hair and let it stream in the wind. He held out his hand to the limb above him, spreading his fingers to the twig tips.

He felt the wood moving freely. He felt no break, and he put no pressure on the budding twigs he had hardly touched, and yet he held a short length in his hand, as wide as his thumb at the base.

He cradled it to his chest. And then he turned to the tree and knelt.

He held the living wood in his hands and the leaves clung to his skin, and he felt the earth as he rocked to the beat, pulsing and mud-soaked to the knees. 

What would a tree sense in the world? Had it, she, he heard Ohlone families as they picked bay nuts? Had children climbed in younger branches while their parents rested in the shade and held each other and looked out to sea, and dreamed in a language that fewer people knew today? Could he learn it?

Tarik held his eyes as the beat quickened between them, as it raced and exalted.

“I’m a woodworker,” Tarik said. “She’s a dancer. I know the wand. She knows the movement.”

The dancers spun up to them, flushed and dripping. Scor bowed to Padma, and she smiled at him.

“There used to be oak and laurel woods up and down the coast,” she said. 

He looked about to speak. Al felt him coiled and breathless, and Scor looked up at him.

And he felt a tug on the line.

He saw Scor’s face change and knew he felt it too. A jolt down the wire like an electric shock, a silent voice in pain. 

Scor said “I’ll go,” and swung away, and Al moved to follow and found Padma facing him.

“It’s Linde —” he said, and the need sang through him, we have to help dear God — and she was spinning to close a hand on Scor’s arm as he vanished, and they were both gone.

—

He stood up dizzy and lunged downhill, and Tarik stopped him with a grip on his arm and five words.

“It’s not a wand yet.” 

“I have to be there.” _For once in my life._

But he could not feel Scor calling him.

“If they need us, we’ll go. I can find her, and you can find him.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t define which him. “But you’ll be stronger if we finish this now.”

Al felt breathless between the communion of the last few minutes and the urgent tug of the line. It was stronger now. Now that Scor was also receiving at the far end. He felt the roots vibrating under his muddy feet and the warm wood in his hand. He had had less last night. He pulled against Tarik’s grip, panting.

“If I don’t come he won’t forgive me.”

“It will help him.”

He realized Tarik was holding his voice steady with an effort. He stood tall and poised, muscles hard under his wet jersey, and the power that had built between them in the workshop was rising now as a call to action. He would never avoid a fight, and he let the woman he loves go without him to help me. 

It hit Al hard that Tarik knew exactly what Padma might be facing right now for two strangers who had walked into his shop that morning. Tarik knew that ugliness far better than he did. Tarik would have stared it down himself.

_I’m doing it again,_ he thought, _and damn it, I will not be that kind of bastard._

“Ok,” he said, on a ragged breath.

“You need a core,” Tarik said. “The wood grounds you, taps into you. You find the right center and it’s a catalyst.”

“Like flint and steel.”

“More like sun and water.” His wand stirred a leaf. “So think now. Any substance you’ve handled, any place you’ve been, any animal or bird you’ve encountered. Tell me what you remember.” His eyes gave no quarter, no time for self-pity.

Al met that look and tried to concentrate. Before last night, it had been years since he had felt even a simple spell move cleanly in his hands. His recent memories blurred, and the clear points were all people and conversations — the grief was real; the places were formica tables and plastic rugs. 

As a boy he had rarely been in the woods. The school grounds were grass and paddocks and playing fields to him. Here and there a class would come under the edge of the trees, but always with an activity, something to accomplish and go back in again. Once they’d gathered water samples and splashed around with the brook sprites and the natterjacks.  
At home, in London, they had sidewalks and ling in a pot and Blodeuedd, the barn owl. He remembered her surprising lightness, the touch of her feet on his wrist, and arguing with his sister about the legend of her name. 

Scor was the one with the country house, and Al had never been allowed to visit until the last year or two of school. They’d gone night skiing. He’d loved the speed and the light on the snow, and they were all he could remember. He felt, suddenly, as though he had never touched the earth before today, or anything living, or anything real.

“It can be a spark,” Tarik said, inexorably. “A flare of static. Tell me the last time you felt a charge.”

He looked up into the fine planes of Tarik’s face, at the firm bone and gleam on his temples, and his skinned hands throbbed around the laurel as he listened for any change on the line, and he could remember only one.

“This morning. When I walked through your door.”

*

They reappeared in the workshop to keep from being seen from the street. The shop was closed, but he would look odd enough to anyone looking in. The door was shut now, and he felt his way past the wooden displays toward the light from the window, angling to keep his dripping ribs away from the wood. He knocked a net float and slid to catch it with his wrists to keep the leaf mold on his hands from rubbing off on it.

Here in the doorway he had felt that warm current on his skin. What had he responded to? A silver belt-buckle, a glass nebula? He touched a beeswax dragon with the back of his hand and felt nothing but carved scales smelling faintly of sage honey.

Not the wool scarves or the dye plants that colored them. He stood directly in front of the door and felt nothing now. He swore, but under Tarik’s eye he would not stop. Nothing had changed since he walked in, except that he was wetter. Except that he carried the laurel in his hands as carefully as though he could feel a heartbeat in it. Except that Scor wasn’t here with him. _This has to work — goddamnit, we don’t have time_ — he kept himself from clenching the fragile twigs of his not-yet-wand, and he felt the laurel pressing on his hands. 

It pressed down. It pressed left. Past his left foot. He looked into the shadows by the doorframe and saw the lump of rock that had propped it open, set to the side now to give the door room to close. 

He stepped toward it, and his bare foot warmed as though he had moved from shade into sun. He felt the current trying to thaw his wet, chilled sole.

He dropped down and held the back of a hand to it, and he felt heat on his hand and on his face. It looked like plain sandy stone veined with dark Pacific green. The heat was almost painful now. He crowded over, cold and dripping, and he looked up at Tarik’s low whistle.

“I said core — you took me seriously.” He half smiled. “You know what that is? Earth’s mantle. Ocean crust when the plates move.”

He picked it up and turned it to the light, and Al, standing, saw the side that had rested on the floor, a smooth plane of the veined mineral.  
Tarik said, “serpentinite.” 

Al breathed in hard, and his hands stopped short. And then he thought, that wasn’t me recoiling. I made my peace with snakes years ago. And dragons. I never wanted heartstring because I wanted the dragons alive.

He took the laurel branch carefully in his right hand and touched the stone with his left. Under his fingers it felt smooth, sleek and muscular, and as hot as Blodeuedd’s feet. He ran his fingers over it, learning its lines and hollows, stroking it.

Tarik nodded as though making up his mind.

“Metamorphic,” he said. “It has change and heat in its nature and at least three elements. It’s a rock that contains sea water. It’s melted and cooled, and on this coast people have made oil lamps from it for hundreds of years.”

He hefted it one-handed, and the room’s lights rose around him. They hovered in the air like Thai fire balloons. They floated about his shoulders. 

He touched the stone surface with his wand, and the rock seemed to drink the light, to soak it in until it shone as translucent as sea water or melted glass. He tilted it and lifted his wand away, and a flake of stone came with it.

“We can combine the wand wood and the core later,” he said. “For now it will be enough if they both touch your skin.” 

Albus took it in his muddy wand hand and held out his free hand, and they were moving. They were on asphalt scattered with broken glass, and he stumbled before he realized his foot was bleeding.

He had left his shoes under the laurel tree.

—

It looked like empty parking lots off the BART. Tarmac and cement filled in the curve of the freeway with scrubbed dirt and corrogated iron, truckyards and peeling walls.  
Al and Tarik came through into heat and raised voices and a mass of people pressing together.

This wasn’t a gang of teenagers. These voices wanted blood.

Al pulled himself upright. He and Tarik had landed against some kind of rough wooden box full of leaves. He steadied himself against the side and felt stems against his arm. Scor would know what’s growing here. 

They had come through in the only place where they could get close to him. He was standing in the planter above them to see over the crowd or be seen. Padma was on the ground beside him with Linde braced at her flank. She was holding up a cell phone like a shield, filming the crowd. 

Linde’s eyes were wide, and he looked scraped and hollow. 

Al and Tarik stood to fill in the space around him. The thrum of urgency was pulling Al hard under the breastbone. Tarik kept hold of his hand, and he did not pull away, but he felt the sprig in his wand hand.

“It’s a poem,” they heard Scor saying. “That’s all it is.” 

He was projecting over the crowd, not with magic, but with the presence he brought into poetry slams, and it was ridiculous, Al thought and wanted to touch him. He stood there in red and gold in the sunlight, as if he had a mic in his hand, with a crowd straining like footballers at an Arsenal match.

“We’ve got a spoken word open mic up on Seventh, and some people start with writers they like. Any of you know Martín Espada?” 

Al felt his body growing cold until the stone burned in his hand. The kid must have tried what he’d heard Scor shout last night. Whether he’d known what it was or not, he’d been driven again and he’d tried it — and they hadn’t been in time somehow — gods and bloody angels. 

He could feel that grey menace and hear it in the throats around him. The sound was gutteral and ugly.

Scor’s shoulder was bleeding. Linde stood as though his gut and his groin were stiff with pain. 

Padma was shielding them. Al felt Tarik silently reaching out to her, and he felt her as the hub of spells from casters all around them, in the crowd and maybe beyond it. Some farther away might have answered her call.

He could feel the web of energy running through her hand. Her phone wasn’t a phone. (A legillamans didn’t need one). But it was a tool. She was using it to focus and connect people, like a portkey. She was running a communication spell with many channels, like a prism splitting light. She was drawing on other people so they could cast together.  
And Scor was giving them cover — he was making himself a target to let her work. He was giving any no-maj in the crowd a reason why the three of them were still standing.

No one had broken the shield yet, because this was a public street. Al had read up before the trip. In this country magic in non-magic areas were strictly regulated. It was illegal for a maj to work magic in sight of a nomaj — or on a nomaj.

That was why people transfigured their wands. Flashing wood around was obvious and dangerous, and a wand didn’t have to look like one to work, though it would be strongest in its natural shape, and it did need to touch your skin. And in an emergency you’d have a better chance of casting unnoticed.

So people make their wands into piercings, Scor had said when Al had told him the case studies. He had wanted not to believe them, but he knew too much about recent history. If people cast silently in vernacular, Scor had said, how do the maj-cops even know how much magic is going on? How do the they think they can stop it?

But as soon as he said it, they both knew the answer. The cops would know because majs would tell them. Any maj could feel magic working, and if it happened near enough and they were good enough, they would know what, who and how.

If you were a maj, and someone worked illegal magic near you, and you didn’t report it — that was illegal too. The charge could extend to anyone you knew. And any other maj around you could report you. Or they and their families could face the same charge.

Padma raised her phone high, pointing the camera at the crowd, and the silent message was clear. If anyone here calls or summons the cops, people will know.

Something thrown shattered on the pavement. The shield wasn’t an invisible wall — nothing so obvious — it was a keep-away, a charm to make anyone in the crowd reluctant to be the first visibly to make a move. Just keep calm and no one gets hurt. 

In an ordinary crowd it might work, he thought. But that thing from last night focused malice. No-majs wouldn’t recognize it as something outside themselves. They’d feel hot-wired with anger at a world that didn’t work the way they wanted it to. Majs would be open to it if they were scared. And this wasn’t their safe ground.

Al concentrated on the communal poly-phone in Padma’s hand. You’d have to tune precisely to learn its shape without harming it. _How many can she call to? That’s how you break the prisoner’s dilemma. If enough of us get together, we can break this. That grey thing is playing the mob, and we’re too scattered and scared to fight it._

He groped toward the nexus of voices.

Scor was trying to speak over the shifting mass. Individual voices rose and broke. He was speaking the poem — because it was a poem. It was an American poem. He had heard it first from one of his spoken word kids and told Al it sounded like a spell fully formed. Alabanza! It was a word of praise and grief and longing for someone lost. He was speaking it now, steadily against the invective around him — praising an everyday world where bread baked and the radio played salsa — praising people who danced to the radio and washed dishes on sore feet in the kitchen in a building about to collapse.

He paused at the end of a line, and Linde took it up in the original Spanish. His voice carried, tenor in the thundery air.

Their voices lifted in the one repeating word. _Alabanza._ Alleluja. It was nakedly beautiful.

The crowd surged. Voices rose to shouting, and Al felt the grey heat of malice hone like a laser pointer — it must feed on this building rage — he could taste it acid in his mouth, and then he was up on the planter with his feet in wet earth and his body between Scor and a descending arm. It jarred his bruised shoulder, and Tarik sent his attacher stumbling back with a dislocating jolt as he adapted the shield around them into an almost physical barrier, absorbing force sent against it. 

Tarik put himself in front of Padma and Scor with his arms lifted to show clearly that his hands were empty. His expression said _you will get to them only through me._ Al felt tears on his face. 

Men’s bodies buffeted the barrier. A broken brick smashed past them into Padma’s raised arm.

The phone shattered.

Al flung himself to catch the nexus, half magically and half physically, his arms stretched out.

The stone in his hand flared hot, and his pulse thudded in his ears. He felt thronged, over-run and flushed head to foot. 

_Root yourself._

He felt the leaves at his back.

They were turning sun into energy and light into new cells. Energy dripped into the earth around their roots and fed the micro-organisms that drew minerals out of the soil to feed the plants. He felt roots running under the soil. Scents in the air carried messages.

This back lot had a row of rough wooden boxes filled with green leaves. Some kind of community garden.

If you could root a spell in the ground, let it move from one person to another, could the earth act like a nexus, a transistor you couldn’t break? 

_We’ve forgotten this back home, haven’t we? We don’t teach it even an elective or an advanced study. Tarik says it’s the first thing he learned where he grew up, how to work a spell with all the magi in his class, everyone together._

He felt the sap and the wood in his hand, and he spoke to it as he had to the tree, and to the twigs at his back. Will you help me?

He felt invisible bodies press against him. They were so close he could feel their voices humming. He felt the nexus through the soles of his bare feet.

Scor and Linde were still speaking, and he joined them silently in the refrain. He felt the shape of the spell Scor had made from it. It wicked up his body, and he sent it — outward. He felt his body sparking like a wire. Scor had tried to teach it to him, one early morning in his LSE dorm, and he had mostly not listened then because he had been sure he couldn’t learn it. And now all he had was Scor putting his hand on Padma’s shoulder as she held the shield, the muscle in his arm as he gave her spell his strength, and his hair sticking to his sweating forehead, and memories — Scor finding him muddy and bleeding when the older Gryffs roughed him up, talking late at night in their common room, calling him when he’d broken up with … taking him to that all-magic club where the dancers all wore moonwalk charms and rebounded off the walls, and the band drifted upward while they played, hey that’s no way to say goodbye … Scor had dared him until he’d gotten two of the glow-worm charms for them, and the translucent nautilus had glowed against the bronze ink in the hollow of Scor’s collarbone, and they’d danced, invisible in the half-lit throng and floating lights, and the sax and bass players seemed to dance together as the blues turned like a tide … _alabanza._

He felt warm bodies around him. He felt the earth under his feet and hands over his. 

He felt the laurel wood humming in his hand.

The storm pressed the top of his skull like a migraine, and he felt a silent spell scrape raw along the shield. A corner of the planter was smoldering. Tarik stamped down and doused it with vacuum.

Charring wood shot into flame.

Once the casting started, people would forget caution. Voices shouting profanity would turn it into cursing.

But he felt the ground under his feet. Scor’s shoulder felt warm against his skin. A current pulsed in his hands. 

He felt Scor take hold of that heat and send it through the words he spoke. And he was joyously defiant, and raw as the night they were talking on their souped-up tin-can telephone on the hols at 3 a.m., the night Scor finally wept for his mother. 

Al took his hand. And it was real in a way nothing else had ever been. 

He sent a warm pressure along the wire, tightening his hold. Root yourself. Then reach out. They were a bucket brigade against a wildfire. But they were here. _We are here._ The sense moved through the frenzy like invisible pheromones. Touching people as they breathed in a scent of cedar and lemon. Holding eyes. Putting hands on shoulders.

The planter they were standing on was blazing. He felt the roots in the earth and the leaves pulling back in searing air. He tried to send the current through his skin to support them.

He felt Tarik tapping into it to beat out the flames and draw moisture from the air. Al dug his feet into the soil. The heat lanced them, but he held a half-ton of earth as though his blood ran through it. Tarik was corralling the fire, and Padma moved to repair the shield as it breached. 

_Someone’s going to notice this much magic._

The grey non-thing was pulsing with a frenzy like a whip. He felt as though the air must be bleeding around it.

Scor and Linde lifted their voices like radio waves.

People in the crowd were turning. 

In the writhe of bodies sweating and stinking of fear, some were standing on the ground. They were holding a line against the mass around them. They were breathing the air. They were coming back into their bodies, in the heat of the morning. He felt them feeling the sun and remembering they were human.

They moved like people at a concert, swaying to the beat and then swinging their shoulders. First one or two people move quietly into the aisles, then a few stand at their seats, and the wave builds.

Scor and Linde were speaking together, and the current bore them up.

_“Teach me to dance. We have no music here. …_  
_I will teach you. Music is all we have.”_

It wasn’t a shield. It was a transformation.

And Al felt the grey nothing screaming as it lost traction, whipping through the crowd in an apoplectic venom straight at the target speaking against it. He felt it and pulled Scor against him. Scor was concentrating on the spell and the move caught him caught off-balance. He looked up, gleaming bronze in the storm light, his hair dishevled and the bird on his chest dark-eyed and fragile in its plumage, and Al wrapped around him, pulling himself into the whip’s path. The laurel in his hand swept up against Scor’s back, dark leaves rushing in the dry air.

Scor wrenched toward the threat, but Al had hold of him, covering him with his body. Their feet were scrabbling in the earth for balance, and he drew on the roots below and the roots in the air, holding them up, and the conduit in his hand, and he was shouting — _querido!_

He felt fire on his skin. His body was burning. He thought, I am a shield. He felt the spell leave him cleanly, and he felt the force of the crowd as they were drawn into its elation and fierce protective instinct around him. He felt his wand hand at Scor’s back, and the stone seemed to focus and radiate scorching heat.

He felt the crowd unified and electrified at his back. He felt Scor raise both hands, and call to them, and they lifed their voices in a congregation — _alabanza!_ — and the joy of it ran in Al’s blood on a fierce edge of pain.

The energy was turning. They were flooding the nothingness. He sweated in the fire and held on.

*

When he came to himself, he felt Padma’s hands on his shoulders. They were cool and light. She was soothing his burns. Scor was still in his arms. Scor was holding him up.  
People were standing in groups, looking exhausted.

They began to walk away, in twos and threes. Tarik was running his hands over the planter, strengthening the scorched wood, and Linde was shakily cleaning damaged plants as best he could. He had found a hose without a nozzel. He was moving his thumb over the end to make a spray.

Al rested his head on Scor’s shoulder.

Tarik and Padma touched them both and Linde, telling them low and almost without words that they should leave here before any cops, maj or not, lugged themselves out to check on the disturbance. 

He heard them ask Linde, _will you come with us_? And he seemed to feel Linde nod three feet away.

They were grouped together, ragged and muddy and streaked with ash. He leaned against Scor and dropped his wand hand, which must be hurting Scor as it braced against his shoulder.

And then Al saw the laurel in his hand. 

The branch had lost its leaves in the smelting heat. It had been tempered in the fire. He ran his hand along it and felt the tears running freely on his neck.  
It seemed to move in his hand like the hand of a lover, like the first fumbling time you holds hands walking, wanting to and not sure.

—

It was early morning, and they were still awake. 

They had been talking for hours all together. Tarik and Padma had taken them all home, to a low house set into a steep hillside. It seemed to be made entirely out of a light wood with long windows looking down to the water. They sat in a garden with a hedge of lemon trees and told each other how they had all gotten there. 

Al and Scor were still sitting outside.

For a long time, no one had wanted to move from here. They talked the sun down over the bay. Tarik levitated in takeout Ethiopian, and they spread makeshift picnic blankets and bread boards and shared with their fingers. They picked oranges off branches and peeled them and passed them around.

The air cooled in the dark, and they draped the picnic blankets around themselves.

It was later now. 

Linde was asleep on the couch, and they could believe he was really asleep, and he would still be there in the morning.

Padma and Tarik got up and went in to sleep in their room with the windows open, and they had said _you’re welcome_ in so many ways Al thought in another 20 years he might begin to believe them. Even if he couldn’t begin to repay them.

He could hear a rustling on a branch. A bird sang three notes. The sky shifted imperceptibly toward dawn, and he felt it like a hand down his spine. He wasn’t ready to let go of this night. He wanted to sit and breathe up here, where the hillside dropped away below him, and he could look out into clear air. He felt for the first time in more days than he could hold that he had done something that counted. He felt as though a current was running between his gut and the back of his neck, as though he might be able to live in his own body. Scor was sitting cross-legged, looking toward the water. 

Al said, “I’ve never seen anything like you talking to that crowd today.”

He saw or felt Scor breathe in. 

Al ran his hand over the laurel wood, fused and glazed like jade. The flake of stone seemed to have melted into its core. He had not let it go since he had come to. And Scor had not touched him since they came here.

Al said, “but I have then, really.”

He felt Scor looking at him and waiting. He thought he could feel the lift of Scor’s ribs and his held breath, and the air sang between them. Who said there was only one kind of silent casting. If there was anything left to say now, it was Al’s to say. He dropped the blanket.

He said. “I should have said years ago. It wasn’t you I didn’t know. It was me. I do now. Whatever you want, I —”

Scor’s hand touched his mouth. And then Scor’s hands were on his face and his neck. Al was bare to the waist to ease his back, and Scor’s shirt swung loose, and Al could feel the pulse of the quail’s wings beating against his own chest.

They were pressed together, and he could feel Scor trying to spare his new sore places but trembling, holding him hard, and Scor said “Whatever I want? God, you bastard.” 

Al felt a lightness rising in him like the sound of surf far below. The night air and the scent of oranges and pine washed through him and he was trembling at the size of knowing they were here and this was real.


End file.
